DBX neoclassical arpeggio etude

Inspired by a recent video by Jason Richardson posted here, I made this tricky little neoclassical etude.
I think it’s good practice for both hands - fretting hand on learning conventionally barred arpeggios without barring, and picking hand on DBX.
Here is the guitar pro / tux guitar file. arpeggioetude.gp3 (1.9 KB)
It’s basically Am down, F up, G down, Em up, F down, Dm up, E down and a harmonic minor run.

E|-12-8-----8-----------------------------------------------------8-----12-|-10-7-----7-----------------------------------------------------7-----10-|
B|-------10----10----10----------------------------------10----10----10----|-------8-----8-----8-----------------------------------8-----8-----8-----|
G|----------------9-----9-----9-----------------10----10----10-------------|----------------7-----7-----7-----------------9-----9-----9--------------|
D|-------------------------10----10----------10----10----------------------|-------------------------9-----9-----------9-----9-----------------------|
A|----------------------------------12-8--12-------------------------------|----------------------------------10-7--10-------------------------------|
E|-------------------------------------------------------------------------|-------------------------------------------------------------------------|


E|-8--5-----5-----------------------------------------------------5-----5--|-4----------------------------------------------------------|
B|-------6-----6-----6-----------------------------------6-----6-----6-----|----5-----5-------------------------------------------------|
G|----------------5-----5-----5-----------------7-----7-----7--------------|-------4-----4-----7--5--4----------------------------------|
D|-------------------------7-----7-----------7-----7-----------------------|----------------6-----------7--6--3-------------------------|
A|----------------------------------8--5--8--------------------------------|-------------------------------------7--5--3----------------|
E|-------------------------------------------------------------------------|----------------------------------------------7--5--4--5----|

For the F barre arpeggio I use the same fingering as for the Am (middle, index, middle for D,G,B strings respectively). For the Em and Dm barre I use middle, ring, middle for D,G,B. It takes a bit of getting used to if you’ve been rolling your finger but I think it pays off.

As for picking, I practice two ways.
1- Economy/directional picking where I do a downstroke when switching to a higher string and upstroke when switching to a lower string. I.e.

   D  U  U  D  U  U  D  U  U  D  U  U  D  U  D  D  U  D  D  U  D  D  U  D    U  D  U  D  U  U  D  U  U  D  U  U  D  U  D  D  U  D  D  U  D  D  U  D 
E|-12-8-----8-----------------------------------------------------8-----12-|-10-7-----7-----------------------------------------------------7-----10-|
B|-------10----10----10----------------------------------10----10----10----|-------8-----8-----8-----------------------------------8-----8-----8-----|
G|----------------9-----9-----9-----------------10----10----10-------------|----------------7-----7-----7-----------------9-----9-----9--------------|
D|-------------------------10----10----------10----10----------------------|-------------------------9-----9-----------9-----9-----------------------|
A|----------------------------------12-8--12-------------------------------|----------------------------------10-7--10-------------------------------|
E|-------------------------------------------------------------------------|-------------------------------------------------------------------------|

It still needs DBX but it’s inside picking. I think I tend to use a forearm helper motion to do these. Here is my attempt at slow, medium, fast tempo. Timing is tough, and I have more trouble with ascending than descending.

2 - Alternate picked. I’m not sure what motion I use here but I think it’s a supinated wrist + forearm blend, at least at high speed (I might be hopping at slow speed). Also I’m definitely swiping and misplacing notes, it’s a work in progress!

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Wow! Fantastic playing! I’m not sure which version I like best. Both sounds awesome!

I love scales and arpeggios in sequences of threes. When played fast, they get this wonderful wobbly sound. I need to work on this too but I’m faaar from where you are. Really inspiring!

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Thanks man! I’ve seen your awesome playing, I’m far from where you are on probably everything else :stuck_out_tongue:

Awesome!

Not really seeing that. Nothing significant anyway.

Not sure where you’re seeing this, your arm looks almost completely stationary the entire time when you speed up. So this is wrist motion, and a great example of it at that. This is the Andy Wood / Anton Oparin “902” approach. The arm stays in its lightly supinated position all the time, and the wrist just goes 9 o’clock, 2 o’clock, 9 o’clock, 2 o’clock, and so on, to get the different escapes. You’re doing an excellent job of this.

It sounds perfectly clean to me but if you’re saying you know there is swiping and other errors, that’s fine. You can clean those up over the long haul by slowing down a little from your fast speed and creating little etudes for the parts where you see errors, as necessary. Otherwise, what’s great is that the motion looks totally smooth. There is no stringhopping or other inefficiency here.

Nice work!

2 Likes

Thanks a lot Troy!

Re: forearm helper for the economy part.
I think this happens on the descending segment (ascending string change), not so much in the rest of it.

Re: 902 approach
You’re probably right - there might still be a discrepancy between how it feels / how I imagine it in my head and how it looks / is.

I definitely feel the downstroke escaping because of wrist extension. For the upstroke I agree it’s wrist deviation driven but when I get myself to do this motion and have it escape, I introduce (or at least visualize introducing) a slight kink in the wrist as if I’m doing a subtle gypsy form, which is why I guessed there might be a small forearm component to it. The wrist looks pretty straight to me too in the original video, but I think I do see a slight kink below. Not sure if that counts as enough of a forearm blend - also I’m not sure this motion is baked in enough so that it is consistent in every take haha :smile:

Great closeup shots, thanks for posting.

I don’t know what you mean by “kink”. The forearm joint rotates the forearm. But the arm doesn’t appear to be turning here, and the pick doesn’t appear to be rotating either. So I’d say the forearm isn’t really involved.

Try not to overthink these things. If the hand is moving side to side and you don’t see much motion in other joints, then the other joints aren’t doing much. Even if there is some tiny amount of forearm motion here and there, ask yourself if that joint motion is really what is causing the pick to move along the path you’re seeing. In this case, the wide flat side to side motion of the pick, where its orientation does not appear to rotate, is what wrist motion looks like.

All of which is mostly irrelevant! Once you arrive at the point you’re at here, where things are clearly working well, you don’t really need to worry about what joints are doing what. Did trying to make certain joint motions and not make others get you to this point in the first place, or was this just something you were already doing which our stuff helped you to understand better?

Thanks for the advice Troy, I appreciate it. The following is pretty academic, but I don’t intend to use this to change the motion, since it’s already working, I just like nerding out on this stuff and improving my understanding and mental model of the motions.

By kink I meant wrist flexion, i.e. the angle the hand forms with the x axis below. If I understand correctly, if the hand was along the x-axis that would be 0 flexion, and if it was along the y-axis that would be 90 deg. max flexion (extreme case of the gypsy form).

It’s clear to me that if I follow an upward trajectory along the z-axis like the one marked, but at 0 flexion, that would be 9 o’clock. It’s also clear that at 90 deg flexion, if I follow a similar z-axis trajectory, that would turn the forearm and I’d guess the clockface wouldn’t apply, as it’s not wrist anymore.

What I’m trying to understand is: what happens in between, like in the picture (which is what I think I am doing in the last video)? Do we still call that 9’o clock? At what point does the clockface stop being applicable? It seems to me that various combinations of wrist and forearm movement are possible in between the extremes, and with a limited range of motion, they might look similar on the guitar but feel different.

I got to this by watching your videos, trying different hand orientations and motion trajectories, and playing different DBX stuff at various speeds (bluegrass runs and rolls, tumeni notes, crosspicked arpeggios from Martin Miller’s interview etc). I never practiced this 1nps alternate picking stuff before finding CtC ~2 years ago, I mostly did economy - I’m sure some of the escape mechanics were there because of that but not in a constantly double-escaping context.

For this particular DBX motion, I have been able to identify the feeling and somewhat reproduce consciously only in the last 3-4 months - it’s been a ride of course, with days when it felt tensiony and days when it felt good. What is mind boggling is that when I look back at my initial attempts 2 years ago, it pretty much looks like the same 902, yet it definitely didn’t feel / exist in my mind the same way. I don’t know whether my body just figured it out before my mind did, or whether it’s a subtly different /refined motion resulting from my conscious effort, but in any case it seems the mental model definitely affects this whole learning process. I still feel like if I were to instruct someone to do this, I would tell them to start with the gypsy upstroke feeling and work towards less flexion, rather than start from the 9 o’clock deviation feeling on the clockface.
Anyway, fascinating stuff - please don’t feel responsible for my overthinking, I’m an engineer and like this stuff :smile: Thanks again!

This in my opinion is actually a very good idea for those who want to unlearn stringhopping, using a way of playing that involves extension on downstrokes and flexion on upstrokes like wrist + forearm DBX or just Gilbert/DiMeola style DSX. If you flex the upstroke and rest stroke it it’s a guarantee that you’re not hopping.

Not sure we’re on the same page, particularly about the terms flexion and extension. But on the topic of string-hopping I would agree that gypsy/forearm USX and especially elbow DSX (as we’ve repeatedly seen in the forum), are good motions to try and break out of hopping.

Hello @spirogyro!

I think you are right, after reading this, for a good 5 minutes I was just gradually flexing my wrist and trying to do a deviation motion. I feel like up to the point of maximum wrist flexion I still can use purely my wrist. So maybe thats the point up to which we can still use the clockface model? Only at the fully flexed gypsy form I seem to have to incorporate my forearm. I think what happens is that as you flex your wrist the angle you can sweep with the pure wrist deviation decreases and to get that wider angle you have to use your forearm.

I guess its just somehow a constraint of the wrist joint. I also tried the same thing with gradually extending my wrist. It seems to me that I can do that motion with pure wrist but it is quite uncomfortable and I don’t know in which guitar playing position one might use that :smile:

My hunch is that it could be the case for a pronated DBX motion with the wrist, something similar to what Molly Tuttle does. But I am no expert and I just wanted share my opinion! :grinning:

I also think the clips you put with the alternate picking approach are quite good motion wise! Especially the slowmotion clip you uploaded in your next post. This is what I am trying to reach also! I’ll definitely try this etude myself.

Which bpm and speed would you say the fast versions are at? I am not really sure which speed to aim for myself :slightly_smiling_face:

Hey thanks a lot for the close look!

The extended wrist is weird but almost feels like it could go full hyperpicking ala milehighshred with some elbow :slight_smile:

Interesting, not sure I can feel that, nor can I completely isolate the wrist beyond some angle. But try going the other way, starting from fully flexed down to maybe ~10 deg flexion like in the picture, but maintain the forearm feel while keeping the motion path kind of the same. Now I feel like the opposite of what you said happens, the wrist comes in to increase the motion range, otherwise you end up with key turning motion.

It’s cool that if you do this on the guitar you end up with a bunch of workable USX motions - at least that’s how I believe I got to the setup I use for DBX. Here’s what I am talking about in case it helps anyone.

Once I touch my palm it probably further decreases the amount of forearm but to me those upstrokes still feel different from pure wrist, which is why I’ve been confused about whether it’s 9 o’clock or not.

I think the fastest here was around 140 bpm 16ths in the first alt picking clip. I find that putting the metronome on at these speeds tenses me up and tends to disappoint me :stuck_out_tongue: . I like to go for as fast as I can without tension, without a metronome, and checking later (looking at your clips like a day or two later helps maintaining positivity in general, what seems slow when you’re practicing can sound pretty fast out of context haha).

Also I am mostly talking about wrist extension muscle (tendon?) tension - I do feel some bicep tension in some passages. Starting from medium speed helps with getting a feel for no tension, like I did in the original clips.

I honestly don’t know whether aiming for a certain speed is the right strategy for this, top speed for me tends to vary from passage to passage and it’s hard to tell how much sloppiness is acceptable - at some point the strokes clearly stop escaping. It has been a constant back n’ forth between fast and sloppy and less fast and somewhat more accurate, all while slightly adjusting motion path and hand orientation/placement until things sound better. Still, not always sure if I’m muting well and swiping or actually DBXing.
Hope this helps, good luck!